Tacticalin
An absolute waste of money
HottWwjdIam
There is just so much movie here. For some it may be too much. But in the same secretly sarcastic way most telemarketers say the phrase, the title of this one is particularly apt.
Janis
One of the most extraordinary films you will see this year. Take that as you want.
Robert J. Maxwell
I must say this ensemble effort doesn't begin too promisingly -- another glimpse of oddity in a small Southern town, people with names like Jewel Mae and Otis and Lester, something along the lines of Beth Henley's "Crimes of the Heart," which couldn't be saved even by my own sterling performance.And it is a little casual in establishing its characters. One wonders where the hell it intends going. Patricia Neal does a fine job with the role of the decrepit old "Cookie" Orcutt in the opening scenes. Neal is old but not THAT old and the talent behind the performance still glows under the crusted patina. But then so does everyone else's, and it's a good cast.Basically the plot is thus: Cookie, knowing she'll join her husband in heaven, cheerfully shoots herself in the head. Two younger cousins -- the too-clever Glenn Close and the exceedingly dumb Julianne Moore -- discover the body and decide to make it look like a murder, suicide being too much of a disgrace for the family to bear.Then the plot gets off the ground in its casual, laid-back, Mississippian way, kinda like a sleepy dog rousin' itself to slink off the dusty road so the universal harvester can chug past. It's too twisted to detail but there were several times I laughed out loud. "Crimes of the Heart" only got one laugh.The gags come not just from Anne Rapp's screenplay but from Altman's direction as well. A semi-serious criminal interrogation goes on in the foreground while in the background two officers marvel at the dimensions of a stuffed catfish on the wall. Glenn Close manages to be caught with her hand in the cookie jar -- literally.I won't go on about it. It's a relaxing and amusing fairy tale.
secondtake
Cookie's Fortune (1999)A wacky, wobbly comedy with a stellar cast playing types and clichés that sometimes run against type and sometimes are too typecast to quite work. The writing varies, too, from warm to comic to contrived. The best parts of the movie might balance out the gaffes for you, though, as the plot coils and the very warm, almost-black comedy grows.The main character here seems at first to be Cookie herself, played by a venerable Patricia Neal. As an old movie fan, this was enough for me alone, and it was great to see Neal at 73 still going strong (she made two movies after this one, too). But the real central character is Willis, played by the little known Charles S. Dutton, who has done a lot of t.v. Willis is a great old friend who helps the old woman out of appreciation and love. One key to this movie is its setting--a small town in the Deep South where everyone knows everyone. And where old racial boundaries and still slow to fall. Cookie is the old white woman in the big house living alone while Willis is a poor black man who drinks a half-pint of Wild Turkey a day. The clichés are too plain to see, and are magnified by the ditzy, apparently racist two women who share a house, Julianne Moore and Glenn Close. Finally there is Liv Tyler who plays the new kind of woman, young and without prejudice.Such warm and fuzzy comedy is bound to avoid real social commentary just as much as avoid biting humor, or laugh-aloud humor for that matter. You have to immerse yourself in the quirks of the town and the likable characters everywhere. Even the most murderous intentions here are just twitches and mistakes. You could almost picture living here, despite all the dumbed down clichés about what white and black culture is all about, and what the people in such a place are like.No, Robert Altman has not quite laid an egg here, but if you take any of this seriously you might find the assumptions and clichés almost insulting, or at least so obvious and worn-out you want to run. From the goofy white cop who play Scrabble with the inmates to the big black woman who sings, of course, the blues in the local bar. From the worker by the railroad yard who lives in a caboose to Liv Tyler herself with that weird voice of hers who is so outside of convention and propriety you wonder why did she come back to this town at all?The writing by Anne Rapp, a "script supervisor" by profession, is the weakest link here. The movie might gloss over its thinness by claiming to be funny, but it just isn't that funny, and it's too laden with the obvious to rise up in other ways. I think this is one of those movies that's going to get worse with time, too, as the clichés look more and more wooden.But hey, lots of people like the film and the trick is to just enjoy what works and accept, if you can, the overworked clichés.
Rockwell_Cronenberg
Cookie's Fortune is another ensemble character piece from Robert Altman, although it's of a lot less magnitude than some of his previous works. The story centers around a group of citizens in the quaint town of Holly Springs, who are thrown into disarray by the sudden death of Cookie Orcutt (Patricia Neal). Altman's scope is much more intimate than some of his other ensemble pieces, and it fits the characters nicely. The whole thing, accompanied by a nice blues score, has this quaint and relaxed atmosphere to it. This makes the film move by at a slower pace, but I never really felt like it dragged or anything, it just sort of coasted along.There are several characters that we focus on, from Cookie's nieces Camille and Cora (Glenn Close and Julianne Moore) to her best friend Willis (Charles S. Dutton) to the police (Chris O'Donnell, Ned Beatty and a few others) to Cora's estranged daughter Emma (Liv Tyler), who has coincidentally just strolled back into town after being gone for a while. Cookie's death sends waves through the small community and turns everyone's situations upside down, resulting in comedic strides and a police investigation. When focusing on the individual characters, I definitely enjoyed myself most of the time, especially when it came to the erratic and revoltingly vain Camille (played with utter theatrical delight by Close) and the eternally laid-back Willis, but I don't think the script managed to bring the characters together in an entirely fluid manner.This especially became a problem when the film was focused on Camille and Cora, who felt as though they were in an entirely different film. The majority of it had that bluesy, Southern atmosphere to it but then you get to the scenes with the two of them and it's like they're in a Tennesse Williams play. The characters are supposed to be a contrast to the rest of the ensemble, but the tones of their sections don't mesh at all with the rest of the film and it's quite distracting. The cast for the most part does a fine job, Close being the only one who impressed me on any major level, but Tyler and O'Donnell stick out like sore thumbs, the flattest pieces of wood in an otherwise quite alive ensemble.I think my main problem with it though came from the final act, which is just a bizarre disaster. Out of nowhere the investigation starts turning up revelations of different familial bonds and lies from the past, but they truly come out of nowhere and ultimately add nothing to the film. It gets so confusing and incoherent in the final act, I don't have a clue what possessed writer Anne Rapp. It drags the film down considerably, but the rest of it was alright, if relatively insignificant.
noralee
"Cookie's Fortune" has Robert Altman's patented esprit de corps with ensembles, here representing the intimacy of small town eccentrics, with somewhat amusing intricacies of lies and misunderstandings. The young folks' parts are underwritten so Chris O'Donnell simply doesn't have a lot to do, though Liv Tyler breathes life into her role.Rufus Thomas has an entertaining bit part. Lyle Lovett's role is a charming bit, less lines but more character substance than O'Donnell's.There is wonderful original blues music throughout, with guitar work by The Edge of U2.(originally written 5/9/1999)
